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In the last six months domain authority, page authority, domains linking to the site have declined. We have focused on removing duplicate content and low quality links which may have had a negative impact on the above metrics.

Our ranking has dropped greatly in the last two months. Could it be due to the above metrics? These numbers seem pretty bad. How can I reverse without engaging in any black hat behavior that could work against me in the future?

6 Responses

Yes, your website can rank with those numbers ... it's going to come down to your competitiors numbers as well as on page factors and keyword usage in titles and descriptions ect. ect. Based on the keywords you are going after and the competition level for each.

Of course building high quality backlinks will help get those DA and PA numbers up as well. There is no quick easy way ... just hard consistant work.

Also social media likes and shares and overall engagement will help with your rankings as well. Get your site liked and shared and tweeted about on a regular basis. Google +, facebook, twitter seem to help my sites do better.

It's basically a little bit of everything done consistantly while tracking and testing.

What were your DA and PA numbers before you noticed the drop in rankings ?

Our DA and PA numbers were a lot better in the past. Domain Authority was around 35 last September.

Since November I took the following steps that were suppose to help according to my SEO provider:

-Ran Copyscape report on site and got rid of about 12 pages of partially duplicate content. Page count for our site is 650 pages.

-A former developer had a mirror site that was indexed by Google. We had that removed.

-We used a 3rd party listing source that had thousands of pointed thousands of alpha numeric URLs to our site. We removed these links.

-In April we requested that about 100 domains remove toxic links to our site. About 30 complied. We disavowed the rest. We followed Google's SEO best practices, so I am very puzzled by the drop in DA and PA.

I would say that because you had so many links removed overall, some of which were definately bad links ... the sheer volume of links reduced your DA because even though some were bad links ... most likely some of them still did pass on some link juice (DA) to your website. That being said ... i have seen websites with just a hundred high quality back links out rank websites with thousands of low quality links ... it really is a tough mathematical equation to figure out exactly.

Make sure you get social media likes, shares and tweets ... also make sure you use the full absolute link like this http://www.mysitenamehere.com when adding a link to your tweets ...

Also focus on getting some high quality backlinks from related domains / citations with a higher PA than your website. Remember Google ranks pages, not websites ... so you really want to look at the PA of the actual page your back ink will be on ... not the DA for the whole domain.

Overall you are much better off in the long run by cleaning up the site and the bad links. Now just a little rebuilding to strengthen your website scores.

My site is kind of dead in the water at the moment. It is my primary lead generation tool so this is very bad. Do you think that getting social media likes shares and links on Twitter and Facebook will work faster that acquiring links? Also what do you mean by using "an absolute domain" for social media posts? At the moment I take the URLS and have them reduced by Bitly so they are not as long. Is that OK? Also, on Twitter I always use #OfficeSpace at the end of the Tweet, is that best practice?

Regarding building links, do you think this would occur naturally if I add high quality blog posts or do you think it best if I somehow solicit these links? Can I develop these links myself or am I better off hiring an online marketing firm to generate them?

On a global basis I am a bit puzzled regarding how links work and when the effect ranking. My SEO firm claims that Google looks at link profile only when there is a Penguin update and that these only occur once or twice a year. So I am puzzled that my ranking has dropped after links have been removed, because there has not been an update. By the same token I have been told even if I build links that will have no effect until the next Penguin update. Am I understanding this correctly?

I replied to you about this on another thread, but I wanted to reiterate:

>> My SEO firm claims that Google looks at link profile only when there is a Penguin update and that these only occur once or twice a year.

This is not correct. Google only looks at removing or handing out Penguin penalties during a Penguin update (1, 2 or 3 times per year is the norm), but regular sites with regular link development can improve at all times. Link building might take a month or so to really show progress, but Google crawls and updates its indices almost constantly. It's simply not true that you will only see ranking improvements once or twice a year.

Similarly, you can lose rankings if you lose links that were counting, outside of a Penguin update.

Regarding DA and PA - yes, you can rank well with any combination of these. They are not indicators of how well you will rank, but a gauge of what your site's authority is relative to every other site Moz analyses, based upon backlinks. DA and PA are configured in a way that is meant to best represent how Moz believes Google values backlink profiles, but clearly Moz doesn't have access to Google's actual algorithm or measures of which links Google counts / discounts / values / doesn't value.

Also, "can I rank well" depends on what query you want to rank for. You will easily outrank a far higher authority website if your site is much more relevant to the query (although it's annoying to see high authority websites pop into SERPs for queries that they're not particularly relevant for, and it does happen from time to time).

If you have relatively low authority and you're trying to rank against similar websites with DA / PA scores in the 70s or so, your job is likely to be a lot harder. That said, it can still be done with focus on the specific niches you're interested in and work on improving the number and quality of links pointing to the site.

Hello Alan, Jane got a lot of good answers for you below. I do agree with her ... Google is going to discover links at different times as many different sites get crawled. Your website ranking can be improved at all times as Google discovers the new links you build or acquire. We see clients site rankings go up consistantly all year long ... Not just 1 or 2 times per year during an update.

Like Jane said, that's where penalties are being discovered and given out. Your website will benefit from new links anytime they are discovered.

Regarding building links ... Social media shares and likes are not to replace link building but in addition to that work. ( Bit.ly is fine ) If you have time and know what to do, you could certainly get those links yourself. My clients just don't have time and are unsure how or where to get links. If you hire a good company, they should be able to make a big impact on a site with a relatively low DA / PA within a few months for sure.The higher your scores the more work it tkaes to improve them. It's easier to go from a PA of 15 to 25 than to go from a PA of 35 to 45.

Of course high quality content is the first step, next step is to get that content out to readers and followers so they can share the content they like. I would share your content on your social media platforms you use and work on buiding subscribers and an email list.

You could send out market analysis of sales in your area by price range, average days on market till sold. Put something usefull together ... you could also ask questions to your clients, sort of verbal survey to find out what kind of info they would like to see. Then put an optin offer, sign up with your email here and get our FREE market report... Real estate mistakes to avoid ! Give out some valuable info, help them out and build a loyal following.

You should do some research on your top ranking competitors and see where their highest PA backlinks are coming from ... and go after these links first ... that should get you some faster results ... of course research those links and make sure they are quality before you add them to your website.

For Twitter how about you use a more specific term like #nycofficespace

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